Discover proven strategies for strengthening your brand's authority in 9 easy steps. From product excellence (featuring Tony's Chocolonely) to customer service mastery (like Amazon), learn how successful brands maintain their edge. This guide covers essential elements, including brand identity, omnichannel content strategy, customer advocacy, and adaptable marketing approaches. Perfect for marketing leaders looking to enhance their brand's presence and authority across digital channels.

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In 2023, the word "brand" was mentioned 19 times in our prediction posts. Counteract that with the following year, and the word "brand" was mentioned an incredible 59 times. That tells you how important everybody in the industry believes that brand is going to be going forward. Now if you are serious or you're looking for ways to improve your brand's authority, today I'm going to show you nine steps on how to strengthen your brand's authority. 

Now the first and the most important thing is to have a great product. For example, I'm not a fan of chocolate. In fact, I have presents from last year, that friends gave me, still sitting up there. But you see this thing called Tony's Chocolonely, I am absolutely wild for it. I can't keep it in the fridge for longer than 24 hours because I will guzzle it like a crazy person.

This is my favorite example of what a brand's product should be. This is how every product should be. It should make people become obsessed with your product that they just want to spend time on it. Whether it's a software, whether it's chocolate, whether it's clothes, whatever it is, you need to have a brand product or there is no brand authority. 

Now closely linked to a great product is impeccable service delivery. And my example for this is Amazon. And why is that? Every time I buy a product on Amazon, I buy with confidence, the confidence of knowing that I can return the product and the return process is so easy.

I bought a trolley from Amazon maybe nine months ago, and then nine months later one of the wheels fell off. I called support, and immediately they refunded me the full price. Where else am I going to get that from? You want a product that people are not just using, but also that when they reach out to your support, they get an incredible experience.

And you know what I always do? And I'm sure many of you do this too. I go online, I type the brand's name, I pull a review, and I go and read some reviews to make sure that that brand has great customer service. It also sends signals to search engines that people love your products. 

Next thing is a strong brand identity. And my example for this is Nike. I've just been told that it's not called a check mark, but it's called the Nike swoosh. Everywhere you see this swoosh or I see this swoosh, I know that it represents Nike. When I go on their website, when I go on their social media, even when I see an item of clothing, I know that it is Nike because of the swoosh.

Now you don't have to be Nike, obviously, but think of how you can create a consistent brand identity on your website, on your social media, so that wherever people engage with your brand, they just know this is X brand. 

Okay. If you've got all of these three foundations in place, it's time to move on to the fun stuff. 

It is very important to know where your customers are hanging out. And a great tool for doing this is SparkToro. 

If you don't know where your customers are hanging out, how are you going to create content for them? Or how are you even going to serve that audience? 

Now sometimes your customers might be hanging out on podcasts — that has blown up in recent years. They might be hanging out on social media. And these days they might even be on community forums, like Reddit and Quora. Who knows? But this can help you find out. 

Now once you find out the where or where your customers go to spend time, you can now create an omnichannel content approach.

I'll start with phone calls or text messages because this is very tricky. Personally, I don't like seeing text messages from brands. I just want to see text from my family members. But it does work. For example, I was upsold to buy a phone by EE when they gave me a cold call. So there are opportunities or certain industries where cold calls might work. But again, be very careful not to spam your audience. 

My favorite for me would be social media. I think, no, not I think. I believe that search is becoming social. And SEO going forward is going to support social search. So if you're not on social, you're not doing things like TikTok, you're not doing things like YouTube, you're not diversifying your content channels, now is the time to start investing in an omnichannel approach. 

How can you create content that supports webinars, podcasts, social media, blogs, short-form content? How do you do that? Once you figure that out, and usually, personally, I think that can be your blog, you can use that to diversify your content channels to all of these different mediums. 

Okay. You know who your audience is. You figured out your omnichannel approach. What next? You have to create content that solves problems. My favorite way to do this is to use the Moz Keyword Explorer. You go on Moz, you type in your keyword that you're trying to solve for, and then you put "for." So, for example, it could be “project management for” and that is going to reveal all of the different audiences that are using your products. 

Now once you know who that audience is, you can start creating content for each of that specific audience. My example here for relevant content is, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this right, but it's SMOTURE.

Okay, SMOTURE does vacuums. And how did I find this brand? I went online and I was looking for a vacuum that can also clean upholstery, like chairs. And I found a YouTube video, somebody was talking about it. And I was like, "Okay. This looks interesting." I read some reviews, and that was how I got convinced to buy this vacuum cleaner.

Once I purchased the vacuum cleaner, guess where I went back to? YouTube again — to go and consume more content on how to set it up and all the different use cases for this vacuum cleaner.

It's not just creating content. The content has to solve a problem that your audience is facing. And that is not just blog posts. So many different ways to solve problems these days. SEOs, come on. We have to start thinking outside the box. 

Okay. Now you're creating content. What else can you do? You can empower your customers to become brand ambassadors.

I think this is the most important content that we can create because people trust people. If your audience is creating content for you, you have stepped into the god-level of content creation because now it is your audience who are saying, "I love this product and here is how I use it."  Imagine coming across this kind of content on social media. I'll be sold because I would trust that this person has no incentive to lie to me.

My example here is Samsung. At least once a week, when I go on TikTok, I will find someone who uses Samsung trying to take a picture that shows me how far the zoom can go. Sometimes they're standing on mountaintops. Sometimes they are standing on, like, maybe 18-story tall buildings. They're just trying to show off that the Samsung phone has an insane zoom quality. And that is why I think that this is a great example of making your customers brand ambassadors because I've never wanted a phone as much as I wanted a Samsung phone just so that I can go somewhere and use the zoom feature. Who knows? I might go on a safari and test that out.

Okay. Very closely connected, brand ambassadors and niche influencers because most times influencers can also be people who use your tools. Who knows? Now what happens here is that you look for people who are your ideal target audience, people who your audience trusts. You partner with them to try out your product or maybe your clothing, whatever it is. They use it. They give their honest feedback. And based on that honest feedback, people will either decide to convert or not.

A great example is Fashion Nova. Just go on TikTok right now. Try it. Go on TikTok, type "Fashion Nova." And you will see the plethora of consumer-created content and niche influencer content that Fashion Nova has got out there.

Now what I really like about Fashion Nova is that when you see one of the contents that an influencer has created, maybe they're wearing a T-shirt and a jeans, right? They've done that hard work of creating the outfit. There's usually a code attached to every outfit they are wearing. You can just take that code, go on the website, pick that exact outfit and buy it. See, they've solved that pain point of people trying to figure out what shirts do I need to wear with these trousers, or what shoe is going to go with this top? And they get influencers to create an entire outfit that just takes away that problem and encourages people to buy. 

Now my final one and probably the one that most people struggle with is being agile and adaptive. What this means is that rather than trying to plan out an entire year of content, you give yourself space to be agile, to be adaptive to what is happening around you in your industry and create content for that. 

And I'm going to use us, we at Moz as the example for this. We have something we call The Practical Marketer Series. It's a webinar series where we invite people like Lily Ray, Mike King, Andy Crestodina to come and talk about what is happening in the industry right now. For example, recently we brought in Lily Ray to talk about parasite SEO, site reputation abuse, and all the recent changes in search. 

Programs like this allow us to be adaptive. We also do that with the blog. When the Google leak document happened, what did we do? Quickly, we got some people in the industry and asked them, "What's your take on what's happening right now with the Google leaks?" And then we pooled that into a roundup and we published that. 

Again, I'm going to say this because I think this is very important. Do not create one year worth of content. It doesn't allow you to be adaptive. Three months, six months, cool. But always stay flexible so that you can respond to changes as they are happening. Because from my experience, that type of content always performs really well, especially in an industry like SEO where people are always struggling to find resources to help them adapt to Google's changes. If you get there first, you capture trust. And in this industry, that is everything. 

Okay. I hope you've gotten everything here, nine steps to improve your brand's authority. Thank you.